The Bird will fly again.

[dolari]

I can't believe it's been just over 10 years since Swan Technologies closed down.  Best place I ever worked, and one of the few places where I felt like family.  When we closed down it was a kick in the stomach for all of us.  

On our last day at work, all sitting on the floor because our cubes and seats were taken away and sold, my manager pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniels he bought when he was hired, and passed it around to drink.  One of the guys who wasn't very reliable left to get ice - he never came back.  We symbolically fired him.  There were a lot of tears that day.  I still have my badge somewhere.

I wonder whatever happened to everyone.  At least there's archive.org to relive that wonderful time:

http://web.archive.org/web/19970628151354/http://www.swantech.com/index.html

Here's the computer I had from 1997 to 2002 - cost me all of $400 to build myself:

$2899 Multimedia 200 MMXtm Technology INF205GX
business lease for $100/mo		200MHz Intel Pentium® Processor MMXtm Technology 32MB EDO Memory, Expand to 256MB 256K Pipelined Burst Cache, upgradeable to 512K 3GB EIDE Mode 4 Hard Drive 3D Video Accelerator with 4MB VRAM 12X EIDE CD-ROM Drive 33.6 Kbps Send/Recieve Fax Modem Ensoniq Vivo 90 Wavetable Sound Card Cambridge Soundworks Stereo Speakers 17" (15.8" Viewable) .28 Pitch Monitor Microsoft® Windows® 95 Office Application Suite MMXTM Software 3 Year Limited Warranty, 1 Year On-Site Service

Um, I hope that displays right, I didn't expect it to actually paste the images and HTML right into the buffer....

Comments

[amw.livejournal.com]

Try linkedin.com if you'd like to look up old work colleagues. It seems to be quite big in the US, especially in the IT industry. It's sort of like a facebook/myspace but a lot more professionally focused. Probably be a good way to network yourself into a job if you do find some cool people you used to work with. One of my ex-colleagues is a super bigwig at Microsoft now, so .. :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/strangelv__/]

That's more than my father paid for the Apple ][ plus!

That's saying something.

It had:
* 700-something kHz 6502
* 48kB of RAM
* A featured but pointless to mention amount of ROM
* Disk ][ 5.25" disk drive, complete with 16 sectored operating system
(this was considered important at the time, although from a practical
standpoint, it was important to know which set of software you could run)
* built-in RF Modulator for display usage
* 8" or so Curtis Mathis color display (soon replaced with a larger monochrome)
* Built-in floating point BASIC
* Integer Basic Games disk (which needed to load the previous BASIC version to run)